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April 1, 2003
Eurocentric Bias in Scholarship on Trauma and MemoryI've been revising my 1996 publication, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge U Press), and have just posted a new chapter, "Remembering Difference: Working Against Eurocentric Bias in Contemporary Scholarship on Trauma and Memory." In this chapter I take on popular psychoanalytic literary critics Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub, and charge them with using and supporting racist and sexist analytic structures. There's a funny story behind this new chapter. I'd originally written it as an essay to be submitted to a collection on trauma and memory. It was rejected by the editor, who just couldn't understand why I insisted on "resisting" the psychoanalytic approach to trauma literature. He didn't like it that I contested Caruth, Felman and Laub, and sent me a copy of his own paper on race and trauma, in which he compared a character created by Toni Morrison with biographical and psychoanalytic material on Sigmund Freud. He got a bit huffy when I pointed out that his appropriation of the Morrison character in the service of praising Freud was an illustration of exactly the sort of racism I critiqued in my article. I've rewritten the article as a new chapter for Worlds because the Caruth/Felman/Laub school has made great strides since 1996, and I thought that it was necessary to provide a strong counterpoint. There are currently three chapters of Worlds online. I'll be adding the six subsequent chapters as I have time. Posted by kalital at April 1, 2003 12:38 PM Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsPost a comment |
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